Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report, our first edition of 2026. We hope you had a restful holiday break, considering we’ve already had at least a month’s worth of news in just the first week of January.

On that note, here’s what’s on tap for the day: Trump wants to turn the U.S. military into his personal global enforcers, protests rock the regime in Iran, and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro gets a prominent U.S. lawyer.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report, our first edition of 2026. We hope you had a restful holiday break, considering we’ve already had at least a month’s worth of news in just the first week of January.

On that note, here’s what’s on tap for the day: Trump wants to turn the U.S. military into his personal global enforcers, protests rock the regime in Iran, and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro gets a prominent U.S. lawyer.

If 2025 marked a year of norm-busting for how the U.S. military is used (as we covered in multiple newsletters), we’re already looking at a possible obliteration of those norms just days into 2026.

So far this year, U.S. President Donald Trump has used the military to seize Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro after months of strikes on alleged drug boats off the country’s coast, and has since mused about taking similar actions against Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Iran, and Greenland.

In case you missed it, he also authorized an airstrike on Islamic State militants in Nigeria last month, citing their alleged targeting of Christians in the country, though details of those allegations and of the strikes themselves have been scant. Experts have emphasized that while there is a problem with deadly jihadi extremist violence in Nigeria, it’s often indiscriminate and impacts people across religious lines.

Trump’s oft-repeated 2024 campaign promise of “no new wars” has repeatedly been blown out of the water, and the U.S. president is now calling for a significantly bigger war chest.

“I have determined that, for the Good of our Country, especially in these very troubled and dangerous times, our Military Budget for the year 2027 should not be $1 Trillion Dollars, but rather $1.5 Trillion Dollars,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday. “This will allow us to build the ‘Dream Military’ that we have long been entitled to and, more importantly, that will keep us SAFE and SECURE, regardless of foe,” he added.

Imagined threats. Many of Trump’s justifications for the military actions he’s taken have been based on flimsy evidence or embellished assertions—particularly when it comes to Venezuela. The Trump administration has characterized the country as a major source of........

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